Housing.com moved away from being a classified portal to a transaction-led revenue model business. Even Just Dial, which is a horizontal classified company, has been working to move to a transaction-led business model. Unlike 99 acres, which aims to remain a pure-play classified company, Housing.com expects to evolve into a transaction-led model.
According to Housing.Com, key differentiating factors of its platform are a) it is far more consumer-focused relative to others; b) it prefers to build its own high-quality rich data rather than user-generated content. For these reasons, the conversion rate for brokers listed on the housing platform is significantly better than it is for many other platforms.
Building content for primary market by working with developers directly: Till last year, the company
did not have any product for the primary market; currently it has 12k projects and 6k developers listed on its platform.
It has 1.4 million monthly unique visitors and 23% conversion into leads vs. the industry standard of 5%. According to the company, direct traffic is growing 40% month-on-month. During January, 15 new listings added were at 60k and it expects to take that to 200k by April and target 500k in future. The mix of consumers and brokers in listings is 50-50.
Currently the company has 100 people in its product and technology team and it plans to take that to 1000 by mid-2016. Two key areas of investment are increasing the supply collection by 10x by April and spending on brand launch. The company has 1000 data collection executives on the ground.